Hollywood sexual abuse scandal grows

Life

Monday 23 October 2017 - 2:51am

James Toback attends the premiere of the movie "The Private Life of a modern Woman" presented out of competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival on September 3, 2017 at Venice Lido.
Photo: Tiziana FABI / AFP

LOS ANGELES – Writer and director James Toback, who received an Oscar nomination for writing Bugsy, has been accused of sexual harassment by 38 women.

Actress Echo Danon recalled an incident on the set of his film Black and White where Toback put his hands on her and said that he would ejaculate if she looked at his eyes and pinched his nipples.

“Everyone wants to work, so they put up with it,” Danon told the Times. “That’s why I put up with it. Because I was hoping to get another job.”

Toback hasn’t responded to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

The report comes amid the ongoing downfall of producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by over three dozen women. He was fired from the company he co-founded and widely denounced by his Hollywood peers.

Another Weinstein accuser, Asia Argento, tweeted, “So proud of my sisters for bringing down yet another pig” in response to the Toback report.

Though less widely known than Weinstein, Toback had a successful four-decade career in Hollywood and has a devoted following who have praised him for his originality and outsized, deeply flawed characters.

A New York native, Harvard graduate, creative writing professor and compulsive gambler, Toback used his own life as inspiration for his first produced screenplay, The Gambler, which came out in 1974 and starred James Caan. The film was remade in 2014 with Mark Walhberg and Brie Larson.

He also wrote and directed the Harvey Keitel film Fingers, the loosely autobiographical The Pick-up Artist, which starred Robert Downey Jr and Molly Ringwald, Two Girls and a Guy, also with Downey Jr and Heather Graham, Harvard Man, with Sarah Michelle Gellar, and the Mike Tyson documentary Tyson.

His one and only Oscar nomination is for writing the Barry Levinson-directed and Warren Beatty-starring Bugsy.

Toback’s upcoming film, The Private Life of a Modern Woman, stars Sienna Miller and Alec Baldwin and debuted at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year.

Like Weinstein, reports of Toback’s alleged behaviour toward women have been around for decades. Spy magazine wrote about him in 1989 and the now-defunct website Gawker also published accounts from women in New York who had had run-ins with Toback.